


Station 524

by Excelsia



Category: VIXX
Genre: Life and Death as Entities, Mention of Suicide Attempt, Other, also please note that the Neo is subtle/implied
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-03
Updated: 2018-05-03
Packaged: 2019-05-01 15:18:28
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,658
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14523465
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Excelsia/pseuds/Excelsia
Summary: Life and Death meet a young man at the station. The question is, who does he leave with?





	Station 524

**Author's Note:**

  * For [wispsofcolour](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wispsofcolour/gifts).



> I wrote this for Dalia after seeing a tweet that made me think of a concept I felt she would like (which you can find here: https://twitter.com/chokercha/status/981575617375121408). It's actually not what I originally envisioned, but I quite like how it ended up anyway. It's not spectacular but she liked it, so I thought I would post it~

“Taekwoon! Over here!”

It was hard to miss Hakyeon in the only occupied seat on the entire train. Even if he wasn’t alone, he always had this strange glow to him that tended to draw you in. For Taekwoon it was a little unnerving.

Hakyeon greeted Taekwoon with giant hug that Taekwoon always referred to as his “death grip”. Just to be funny.

He sat down beside Hakyeon, tilting his head curiously when he noticed his clothing choice. “Knitted blue sweater today.”

Hakyeon smiled, tugging at the hem of it and looking down at it proudly. “Nice, isn’t it? Comforting.” 

“Comforting...yeah,” said Taekwoon, nodding. He preferred to stick to a simple black shirt with a blazer himself. Business-like but functional.

“I brought us food,” said Hakyeon. A multi-tiered bento sat in the empty seat near the window, wrapped in a patterned cloth. Hakyeon was always prepared for these trips. A little too prepared, if you asked Taekwoon.

Hakyeon brought his hands together excitedly. “Let’s eat! You definitely need lunch. No offense but you look like death.” 

Taekwoon had to laugh at that one.

~~~  
The train pulled into Station 524.

On a nearby bench sat a young man, late teens maybe, who looked like he’d been waiting for a long time. He stood up nervously as the train slowed to halt, and seemed confused when Taekwoon and Hakyeon came onto the platform.

“Hello there,” said Hakyeon, beaming at the young man as they approached him. He was like a salesperson working for a commission. Taekwoon was less hands-on about these things.

“Hi,” the young man responded. The word was clipped, strained. 

“You look like you need some help,” said Taekwoon. The young man looked back and forth between the two, as if deciding if he should trust them.

“I…”

“It’s okay,” said Hakyeon. “We know you’re overwhelmed. First things first--what’s your name?”

He stared at them like he didn’t understand the question. And then his brow knit together in thought.

“My name…”

“Don’t worry, you know this one,” said Taekwoon. “The questions will only get harder from here.”

“...Sang….Sanghyuk. My name is Sanghyuk.” He said it like he was trying to convince himself more than anyone else.

“Excellent,” said Hakyeon. “Will you join us for some coffee, Sanghyuk?”

~~~  
Sanghyuk sat across from them at the station coffee shop’s outdoor tables, holding his paper cup as he let the hot beverage cool.

“Do I know you guys?” he asked them. 

Taekwoon chuckled. “Everyone knows us.”

“The question you should probably be asking,” Hakyeon began, “is why are you here, and where are you going from this point.”

Sanghyuk absorbed the words and let them work in his mind. “Why am I here…”

The two waited patiently. Hakyeon had nearly finished his own small coffee and Taekwoon was absently mixing the ice in his drink’s plastic cup when the answer came.

_“The night after I fought with my parents…”_

Hakyeon grinned. “Bingo~”

Sanghyuk’s eyes darted back and forth as the memories started coming back. “The last thing I remember...I couldn’t see...someone was holding my hand, I think...I could hear crying…” He looked up at Hakyeon and Taekwoon. “Am I dead?”

“Not quite,” said Taekwoon. “You’re in a coma. Have been for a while, actually.”

“Your condition hasn’t changed for weeks,” Hakyeon added. “That’s why we’re here.”

Sanghyuk’s face lit up in recognition at the two of them. “Life and death.”

Hakyeon smiled. “Precisely.”

Sanghyuk nodded his head lightly. “Huh.” He gulped down several sips of his coffee.

“Here comes the tough part,” said Taekwoon, leaning forward to rest his arms on the table. “We’re going to ask you a question. And your answer will decide which one of us you go with. Sound good?”

Sanghyuk started picking at the rim of his paper cup. “...okay.”

“Good.” Taekwoon leaned back into his chair again and took a sip of his iced coffee. 

This time it was Hakyeon who spoke. “Sanghyuk. What reason do you have to live?”

Sanghyuk sighed deeply, sitting back in his chair and resting his hands behind his head. “You spend your whole life doing the practice question but when test day comes…”

Hakyeon laughed. “Take your time.”

Sanghyuk sat up again, reaching for his coffee but not drinking any. “I-I mean, I have a family...friends, a couple really good friends...I just started uni…”

“And that’s all very nice,” said Hakyeon. “But I’ll repeat the question: What reason do you have to live?”

It was silent for a moment. And then Sanghyuk said, “Most days I wish I knew.”

“Most days…” Taekwoon repeated. “What about the other says? The some days?”

“It’s dumb,” Sanghyuk replied, a little too quickly. Maybe it was a question he asked himself so much that he’d gotten sick of it.

“Try us,” said Taekwoon, not moving his eyes from Sanghyuk.

Sanghyuk looked away, but responded. “...I have this one friend, Namjoo. Not like one of my regular friends. Actually, you know what, I don’t even know if we really count as friends...but it feels like we are. We follow each other’s blogs...this is getting more embarrassing the more I talk…”

“No, no, go on,” said Hakyeon. Both he and Taekwoon were focused on Sanghyuk’s energy as he spoke.

“Well, we sort of...check in on each other? I mean she and I have a lot in common and like that’s fun and all but we both...get each other in a way that nobody else has been able to. To put it simply, we have the same problems that nobody else really knows about, I guess.”

“True love, perhaps?” asked Hakyeon, intrigued. 

Sanghyuk laughed out loud. “True friendship. We don’t see each other like that. That’s a huge part of why we’re so close, actually.”

“I see,” said Hakyeon, and Sanghyuk somehow knew that he did.

“But I mean, I’ve never even _met_ the girl, but it feels like we know each other. Sometimes even more than our friends do. Or, our real life friends. Not that she’s not real. It’s hard to explain.”

“So this friendship,” said Taekwoon, steering him back to the question. “It’s reason enough for you to go back?”

Sanghyuk searched his thoughts, but he didn’t need to go far before he started nodding. “Yeah.”

“For her sake or your own?” Hakyeon asked. The question was loaded with finality.

“Both…”

Taekwoon shook the ice in his cup to get the remaining coffee to settle at the bottom. “People say that a lot, I’ve noticed. Like it’s hard to decide.”

“Life as a human is hard to decide,” Sanghyuk replied. “But I mean, I guess it’d suck if we didn’t get to finally meet like we planned...okay that’s an understatement, we’ve been looking forward to it for months. She’s probably been worried...maybe she thinks I…” He cleared his throat and took a sip of his coffee. When he placed his cup back on the table, two yellow flowers had appeared, laying on the surface: one wilted and one fully bloomed.

“How badly do you want to meet her?” asked Taekwoon. Sanghyuk looked at the flowers. Soft and firm petals. Shriveled and wrinkled ones. One stem sturdy, the other fragile. A vibrant yellow. A fading one. He felt like he could tell the truth to them.

“It’s the reason I tried to swerve at the last second before I hit the wall,” he said. Silence. Brief, but reverent.

“It’s dumb,” said Sanghyuk. He was still talking to the flowers. “I have all these great things in my life, parents who love me--or well, I think they still do--and friends who care about me, I even somehow got a small scholarship at uni. But this faceless person across the world who I’ve never even met. I don’t even know if I really know her. She was the reason. The hope she helped me find was the reason. It doesn’t make sense…

“And now this.” He looked up at Hakyeon and Taekwoon. “I’m having coffee with life and death.”

Taekwoon blinked at him from across the table. “You humans are so existential.”

Sanghyuk laughed. “Courtesy of intro to philosophy last semester.” He looked down at the flowers again but they were gone--when he looked around for them he saw that Hakyeon held the blooming flower, twisting it gently in his fingers, and the wilted flower stuck out from the front pocket of Taekwoon’s blazer.

“To see your friend in person for the first time,” Hakyeon mused. “Curious. We’ve heard bolder reasons, but somehow the smaller ones like this are just as powerful.”

“Is it enough?” Taekwoon asked.

Sanghyuk took a deep breath. “...yeah. It is.”

“Then the decision is made,” said Hakyeon. His face was unreadable.

Sanghyuk steeled himself. “Yeah...I want to live.”

Hakyeon deflated a bit. 

Taekwoon stood up, offering his hand to Sanghyuk. “Excellent choice.”

~~~  
Hakyeon saw them off with a freshly packed bento for the train ride back.

“Don’t wait up for me,” said Taekwoon, ushering Sanghyuk up the steps into the carriage. 

Hakyeon grinned. “I don’t have to. You always come back to me.”

He always knew how to make Taekwoon laugh.

Sanghyuk took the window seat, and Taekwoon sat down beside him with the bento on his lap.

“We should eat these while they’re still fresh,” he said.

Sanghyuk nodded, staring somewhere out the window. Then he turned to Taekwoon. “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“Why is it that you have the wilted flower and Death has the living flower?”

Taekwoon looked down at the flower in his pocket, instinctively reaching to touch it. He fingered the withered thing gingerly. “They’re reminders that we can never be without each other.”

“True love, perhaps?” asked Sanghyuk, mimicking Hakyeon’s earlier comment. “Or true friendship?” he added in his regular voice.

Taekwoon began to untie the knot of the cloth wrap around the bento. “Both.”


End file.
